Barriers to Sustainable Management of Agricultural Water Resources for Educating the Farmers in the Rural Regions (Study in the Qeshlaq Dam Area in Kurdistan Province)

In this research, hierarchical process has been applied for prioritizing options and barriers criteria of sustainable management of agricultural water resources. For this purpose, first, according to the identified criteria and options, data from experts of Ab Baran cooperatives in Kurdistan province based on paired comparison of data were collected through a questionnaire answered by 29 selected samples and the expert choice software was used to analyze them. The results showed that the legal and policy options were considered the highest among the other eight options. It is also known to be the most important obstacle to the sustainable management of agricultural water consumption. After that, economic-support, extension-education, exploitation style, social, institutional and organizational, planning and natural options were located. Furthermore, the results concerning the relative importance of criteria for significance evaluating of management of agricultural water obstacles revealed that water efficiency at the farm level is the most important and then increasing agricultural water productivity, optimum transfer of agricultural water, resources conservation, water conservation, improving water efficiency, irrigation system and farmer's participation were important in turn.